Day after day the unblemished sun. It's hot, but still, with a warm welcome, we save hot stuff for the enchilada dinner from down-on-the-border, straight from a Texas kitchen ready to reheat in the home frying pan with a loud “Yippy-i-ee.” Three tins in the kit. First out, frijoles, the beans prepared with the pulp of red pepper. Next, a tin of enchilada sauce. It's rich, it's red, and it's hot, hotter, hottest. Last, the big tin of tortillas, the flat corn cakes of Old Mexico, ready for frying, 2 dozen, and each paper-thin, 6 inches wide.
Along with the trio of tins come directions for dinner. All you need add are a pair of onions and ½ pound of grated cheese. Get out a couple of skillets, and let's fry tortillas one at a time in shallow, hot fat; they crisp in two seconds. The enchilada sauce is in skillet two and made hot as blazes. Lift the tortillas from hot fat to hot sauce, then out to a cookie sheet. Sprinkle with chopped onion and cheese. When all are fried, stacked, and ready, place and cookie sheetful into a slow oven and bring them forth piping. Serve with a fried or poached egg topping each portion and ladle on the leftover sauce.
Serve the beans hot. Any extra tortillas pass as tostadas. Deep-fried, salted, they accompany the cocktails.
The enchilada dinner is advertised as sufficient for six. We say nix, not if you like Mexican fare—then three may eat. The price is $1.90 for the 3-tin set. Order from Valley Canning Company, P. O. Box 31, El Paso, Texas.
Send a bon voyage basket Western Union, no charge for your message. Ask for the gift-basket telegram blank which offers twelve suggestions for saying “Happy journey.” Three prices in baskets—$7.50, $10, and $12.50. You pay Western Union the basket cost only, the wire goes free along with your order to Seven Park Avenue Foods at 7 Oark Avenue. There are basket is packed and delivered to boat, plane, or train, to hospital or private residence in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Long Island, or New Jersey. The store by special arrangement with Western Union pays for your greeting.
Thinking you would like to know in more detail what your money buys, we visited “Seven Park,” owned by Irving and Herman Kadushin, for a look at the merchandise. It's all of the best. In the $7.50 kit goes fruit, candies, jellies, and biscuits. Higher-priced baskets have additional luxuries; brandied fruits, Roman- off caviar, imported Strasbourg pâté. Candies are by Bagatelle and Louis Sherry; a few items imported, one the Holland hopjes; fruits and jellies by Raffetto. All is top-drawer merchandise.
Lime juice by L. Rose and Company, Ltd., of London, is made again after a wartime suspension. Remember the bottles with the entwined lime branches, the gold, yellow, and green label? Remember the refreshing flavor that the pale green juice imparted to summer drinks? And use it in recipes for jellied salads, in frozen desserts, in luscious cream pies, wherever lime juice is needed. But take it easy when you splash in the juice. This flavoring is the filtered juice of crushed tree-ripened fruit and is extra full-bodied.
The making of the product starts on the Island of Dominica in the British West Indies where the Rose firm has its lime groves which blossom and bear the year round. At the mill the fruit is crushed between granite rollers, and juice, pulp, and essential oil turned into wax-lined oak casks for shipment to England. At the London plant this is stored in 12,000-gallon oak tanks and allowed to rest until the pulp and essential oils rise to the top. Then the pure lime juice is drained off, filtered, bottled, and ready for distribution in the world's fine food shops.
The lime juice is available in New York at Joseph Victori and Company, 164 Pearl Street; the Gristede stores; B Altman and Company, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street; Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue; Hammacher Schlemmer, 145 East 57th Street; Vendome Table Delicacies, 415 Madison Avenue; Maison Glass, 15 East 47th Street; and in Brooklyn, at Ecklebe and Guyer, 1 DeKalb Avenue.
Aristocates of biscuitdom, those Verkade wafers here from Zaandam, Holland, packed to keep just next to forever—that is, until opened. Perfect for galleys on boats and pantries is cottages down by the sea. The study tin boxes are cussed things to open—but once you get there the cookies are as fresh as the day they came from the oven. The Maries are our favorites, a dry, crisp cookie about two inches across and baked to a sand-burr brown, not very sweet, ideal with tea. Pleasant in the mouth, powdering into dust with a warm toasty taste.
The Petit Beurre is similar to the Marie, dry, crisp, long-baked, warm on the tongue, but of oblong cut, and a little less tender. These two wafers serve as the calling cards for the Verdake Company, bearing the name of the maker and the address Zaandam, Holland, right on their top sides, selling at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue. About 12 dozen wafers to a box, the price $2.20 for the Petit Beurres, $1.95 for the Maries.
Café Noir, a third member of the line, is somewhat similar to the Marie, oblong in shape, then frosted with a thick, smooth icing, coffee- and cream-flavored. A sturdy sweet, no frills other than the smooth, shiny frosting.
Little charmers are the chocolate “wafels,” these a waffle-like stuff in finger lengths, sandwiched with a soft creamy chocolate filling. Not the least heavy, yet supplying that little fillip of sweetness one likes with fresh or stewed fruit. The cookies are scheduled for national distribution by autumn.
Something new is being done with the Lebkuchen batter. It is baked in thin sheets, then two of these are layered with strawberry jam, topped with strawberry icing, and cut into stamp-sized sandwiches, moist and spicy, demanding a best cup of tea. The 1-pound box sells for around $1.65, makers the Selka Cookie Company, St. Louis. In New York City at Vendome Table Delicacies, 415 Madison Avenue; in Newark, New Jersey, I. Bamberger, and in Brooklyn, Ecklebe and Guyer, 1 DeKalb Avenue.
Selling on sight those cocktail “bitz” and “sticks” packed by Zed, vacuum-sealed jars insuring their freshness. Some are tangy of cheese, one offers a taste combination of celery and onion. There are corn sticks, soy sticks, and sticks of tomato. Pretzel Bitz are salty and crisp and Ittay Bitz are tanged sharply of Cheddar. Selling nationwide ask at your favorite delicatessen counter. In New York City, Shaffer's, 673 Madison Avenue, have the sticks and Bitz, 9-ounce jars for 75 cents.
Passion isn't what you think; it's a fruit sensation announced for American kitchens by the Office of the Australiar Government Trade Commissioner. The grand passion—a plump semitropical fruit with a tough purple skin—is filled with soft pulp, golden yellow, speckled with dark pips, the juice flower-like in fragrance and flavor.
Australia sends her glamour fruit in nectar form. It comes styled for drink-mixing, or to flavor ice cream, jellies, pies, cakes and puddings. Try a dash over a fruit compote, over a fruit salad, in fruit punch.
The flavor of the passion fruit is as beloved in Australia as chocolate is here. It's the most popular drink of the Australian drugstore. It is offered in restaurants, sold bottled at the grocer's, sold fresh in fruit marts. On the cook's shelf the bottle of passion fruit towers side by side with vanilla extract. It's the drink served at afternoon tennis. A bottle of passion fruit beverage goes along in the lunchbox for the school crowd It's used in Australian bars, a natural with gin, a soul mate to rum. A cocktail folder accompanying the bottle intrigues with recipes for a Grand Passion, a Jackaroo, a Waltzing Matilda!
Australia cultivates the passion fruit scientifically and with outstanding success. Thousands of acres around Mangrove Mountain, fifty miles out of Sydney, are given to growing the vine. Also in the Northern Rivers districts of New South Wales, where are fruit can bask in the sun who no danger of frost. It was twenty-one years ago that Norman Meyers started bottling this juice in his mother's kitchen. Today his firm is the largest bottler of passion juice on the Island, the all-modern plant located in Mosman, a suburb of Sydney, boasting stainless-steel equipment.
The juice had mighty appeal for GI's posted in Australia during the war. That gave Norman Meyers his idea for introducing the juice in the States. Last winter he visited New York to take notes on our drinking. Like all Australians he was convinced we have no soft drink to compare with the passion nectar, no flavour for our cooking that can match this flower-like fruit which Australians consider ambrosia for the angles. Arrangements were made with Perry H. Chipurnoi, Inc., New York, to import the product, and now comes the first shipment. Among New York stores handling the nectar are: B. Altman, Maison Glass, 15 East 47th Street, and numerous Gristede stores. Locser's have it in Brooklyn, Thomas Fluke in Philadelphia, Hudson's in Detroit, Kauffman's in Pittsburgh, and Davison-Paxon in Atlanta.
English marmalades find their way back to New York. In the B. Altman grocery, Fifth Avenue and 34th Street are a trio of these, Tickler's Nell Swyn, Robertson's Golden Shred, and Keeler's in stone jars, the latter made here but by the English firm's formula. Frank Cooper's Oxford Seville Marmalade is newly arrived, selling at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue, the pound jar 89 cents.
Food prejudices would be a lively subject for the psychiatrists. Recently we had a moment of repulsion on opening a tin labeled “Agaricus,” there beholding a flock of tiny rice birds, each no bigger than an infant sparrow. Heads off, feet gone, insides out, all tenderly cooked. Now why should the stomach have jumped so alarmingly? It can only be accounted for by the abnormal activity of the subconscious mind.
Heaven only knows the queer things we have eaten without the bat of any eyelash, eaten and enjoyed. There was bear steak for one thing, eels, for another, and kangaroo-tail soup, horse-meat stew, Chinese century-old eggs, broiled rattle-snake, birds-nest soup, and once to make good on a dare, a few forkfuls of a fried mess of angleworms. But those rice birds!
After swallowing twice we sampled and found them very good indeed, after artful preparation in the Chinese manner. Just as ginger leaves with snake meat add greatly to its delicacy, so is the sauce important with these little birds of the field.
A rare tidbit in China, the rice bird is served as an hours d'oeuvre thusly: Remove from the tin, sprinkle lightly with a hot sauce, and serve on very thin slices of Bermuda onion on Melba toast. To serve hot: Remove from the tin, heat in a double boiler, place in a dish garnished with shredded lettuce and scallions. Another method is to heat, then sauce with a mixture made of ¼ cup of dry port or sherry, ¼ cup of China Mandarin oyster sauce, à la chassour game sauce, or B.S. sauce, and 1/8 pound of butter. Thicken slightly, serve on a bed of cooked wild rice with a dash of paprika. Around the platter place pear slices alternately with orange rings, a ripe olive in the center of each.
For a cold luncheon the birds may be set in a wine aspic garnished with truffles and the white of hard-cooked egg. Sold by C. Henderson, 52 East 55th Street, the 10-ounce tins, about seven birds, $3.25.
Fortnum and Mason's, those eclectic merchants of London, long out of this market, are easing in again, sending two teas, an Earl Grey and a Lapsang souchong, at Charles and Company, 340 Madison Avenue.
From Germany Apollinaris water, the first postwar shipment, selling 35 cents a bottle or $4 a dozen, $16.25 for a case, waiting at Charles and Company.
A saucy set of sweet sauces from the Charlotte Charles Kitchen in Evanston, Illinois, are in leading nation-wide stores. Five in the set retail around $3.75. One, the brandied cherry, is an old-timer, this confected with maraschino cherries and a high voltage of brandy, styled originally to flame over plum pudding. Newest of the line is called the Black Horse, a thick molasses-colored sweetness that smells and tastes like root beer. Raspberry sauce is a smooth, thick substance, Burgundy red, but not so natural in flavor as others in the collection. The rum sauce is exquisite, that is to rum lovers. Smooth like thick cream, a dark amber color, dark rum the taste. Deceptively tranquil, yet we have a notion that a few spoonfuls of that might creep up on the uninitiated. This is a sauce for bathing the home-baked baba, to use in dousing the crêles. Peppermint, the fifth member, is thick, smooth, a vibrant green, one to use in making a parfait. Beat its green beauty into a cream, then layer the pastel-tinted fluff with vanilla ice cream in a tall glass, over the top a swish of plain sauce, and let it rove where it may.
A restyling job is being done on the marshmallow. Now it's made larger, made in a variety of flavors, then chocolate-covered. One of New York City's best marshmallow assortments sells mail order from the Schwartz shop, 131 West 72nd Street. Here the chocolate-covered softies are two inches square, made in five flavors—maple, rum, vanilla, banana, and cherry, the price ＄1.25 a pound, mail order $1.50, which includes packing and postage.